Wednesday 4 September 2013

Judge rejects release of info on Bin Laden by movie makers

A US judge has refused to
allow the public release of information divulged
by the CIA to the producers of the film “Zero Dark
Thirty,” a judicial source told AFP on Wednesday. The Hollywood movie about the hunt for 9/11
mastermind terrorist Obama bin Laden relied on
information disclosed to its director Katherine
Bigelow and the movie’s screenwriter Mark Boal
by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The names of key figures involved in the planning
of the top secret mission were sought by the non-
governmental group Judicial Watch, which had
argued in a court filing that since they had been
revealed by US intelligence, they no longer could
be classified as secret.



Bin Laden

Judicial Watch in its suit in US District Court
criticized the Barack Obama administration, which
it said “gave the Hollywood filmmakers unusual
access to classified intelligence information,
including the names of CIA operatives involved in
the Bin Laden raid.” US District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras,
however, dismissed the petition in an August 28
ruling which found that names of four CIA
officials and a member of the Navy Seal team
involved in planning the raid were not included in
the movie, and therefore could remain secret. “In short, Judicial Watch does not know — and
outside of this suit, apparently has no way of
learning — the names of these individuals,”
Contreras said in his ruling. “That fact is strong evidence that those names are
not in the public domain.” The US Justice Department had argued that
making the names public would create an
“unnecessary security and counterintelligence
risk.” Contreras issued his decision as defendants
accused in the September 11, 2001 attacks await
a military ruling in a similar request, expected in a
hearing later this month at the Guantanamo Bay
military base. James Connell, an attorney for one of the
defendants — Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, also known as
Ammar al-Baluchi — is seeking to learn as much
as the Hollywood directors got in preparation of
the movie. “The ruling that the CIA is able to hide
information from the public about Zero Dark
Thirty does not mean that the prosecution can
hide the same information from Mr al-Baluchi’s
lawyers,” said Connell, whose Pakistani client is
identified in the movie as the prisoner subjected to torture in a secret CIA prison. Al-Baluchi’s uncle, alleged 9/11 mastermind
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also is to be tried at
the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The other defendants are Mustapha al-Hawsawi of
Saudi Arabia and Yemenis Ramzi Binalshibh and
Walid bin Attash. The five face the death penalty if convicted for
their roles in the 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda
militants in which hijacked planes were used to
strike New York, Washington and Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, killing 2,976 people. The defendants have been held at the US “war on
terror” detention center since 2006.

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